Everyone I’d spoken with in his circle, without exception, had exclaimed how ably he was adjusting. He appears healthy and his skin has nice color. He’s still thin—the end of his belt dangles—but not emaciated like he once was. The lack of a beard skews him younger. He’s been to a dentist; one tooth has been removed, I see, and the rest are shiny and clean. But one of the first things he says is that the optimistic face he’s displayed in public is false, another mask. In truth, he’s hurting.
“I’m not doing very well,” he admits, gazing over my shoulder in his usual manner. Nobody understands him, he tells me. People constantly take offense at what he says. “They misconstrue me as arrogant. I feel like I’m in high school all over again.” He sacrificed everything else in the world for complete autonomy, and now he’s nearly fifty years old and not allowed to make simple decisions for himself.
The judge, his counselors, and his therapist, says Knight, speak to him as though he’s a child. Every time he admitted he was struggling, they fed him platitudes. Knight rattles them off: “Oh, it’ll get better. Look on the bright side. The sun will come up tomorrow.” He grew tired of hearing them, so now he keeps quiet. He doesn’t blame anyone—“everyone’s doing their best,” he says in a way that can be construed as arrogant—but following their rules causes him to feel worse. Jail, in some sense, was preferable. Now that he’s free, it is clear that he isn’t.
He reaches into a front pocket of his jeans and pulls out a watch with a broken strap. His family, he says, doesn’t want him speaking with me. If they knew I was here, they’d be upset. The timing of my visit is good, but we don’t have long. His mother is coming home soon. And then his brother needs to drive him to Augusta for his drug testing. He shakes his head. He’s never in his life used illegal drugs, not so much as a toke of pot, yet this is how he must spend his afternoon.
“I am a square peg,” he says. Everybody he encounters, he feels, is smashing at him, pounding on him, trying to jam him into a round hole. Society seems no more welcoming to him than before he left. He fears he may be forced to take psychotropic medicines, drugs that will mess with his brain, when he already knows exactly how to fix everything.
All he needs to do is return to his camp. Though, of course, he can’t. He must perform the whole dog-and-pony show of his punishment. “Am I crazy?” he asks. He says he received the video of my books, but that lately he’s not even interested in reading. He asks again: “Am I crazy?”
Knight looks at me and actually holds eye contact for a few beats, and I can read the sadness. While in jail, he had always felt emotionally closed off. Possibly, it was the cumbersome arrangement of the visiting booth—the glass wall, the staticky phone receivers, the lack of privacy. Now his face has taken on a new dimension, no longer cold and off-putting. He is reaching out; he seems to be asking for help.
Maybe the best way to forge a bond with a true hermit is to leave him alone for a while. In jail he was orating, pontificating. Now we are speaking. Some connection has formed. We aren’t friends, but perhaps we are acquaintances. By explaining to me how nobody else understood him, he may have hinted that he feels like I do have some understanding.
I say to him, truthfully, that I don’t believe he is crazy.
Then, as if to challenge my conclusion, he suddenly asks me a seemingly random question. “What do you think I’m talking about when I say ‘the Lady of the Woods’? I’m speaking allegorically.”
“Mother Nature,” I guess.
“No,” he says. “Death.”
Knight’s question wasn’t random. Death, in fact, is the subject he most wants to talk about. He says that he’s seen the Lady of the Woods before, during a very bad winter. His food was finished, his propane used up, and the cold was unrelenting. He was in his bed, in his tent, starving, freezing, dying. The Lady appeared. She was wearing a hooded sweater, a feminine Grim Reaper. She lifted an eyebrow and lowered her hood. She asked if he was going with her or staying. He says he’s aware, on an intellectual level, that it was just some fevered, desperate hallucination, but he’s still not entirely sure.
He tells me he has a plan. He is going to wait for the first really frigid day, probably in late November, six or so months from now, and he will set out into the forest wearing very little clothing. He will walk as deep into the woods as he can. Then he is going to sit down and allow nature to take care of him. He will freeze himself to death. “I’m going to walk with the Lady of the Woods,” he says. He thinks about this all the time. He realizes he’s caught in an impossible trap: if he seeks liberty by returning to his camp, he’ll be locked up. He craves to “touch, embrace, accept relief.” He’s done some research; hypothermia, he believes, is a painless way to die. “It’s the only thing that will make me free.”
He stands stiffly, hands in his jean pockets. “Something’s got to give,” he says. “Or something’s going to break.” And this is the line that breaks him. His voice catches and his Stoicism crumbles, and the humanity beneath pushes out, and I glance at his face and see tears sliding down his cheeks.
I can’t help it. I cry as well. Two grown men standing beneath a lilac tree on a gorgeous spring day. Knight is able, after all, to interact with another person, and do so in the most open and vulnerable way. And right then, I come the closest I think I ever will to understanding why Knight left. He left because the world is not made to accommodate people like him. He was never happy in his youth—not in high school, not with a job, not being around other people. It made him feel constantly nervous. There was no place for him, and instead of suffering further, he escaped. It wasn’t so much a protest as a quest; he was like a refugee from the human race. The forest offered him shelter.
“I did it because the alternative was— I wasn’t content,” says Knight. “I did find a place where I was content.”
I think that most of us feel like something is missing from our lives, and I wondered then if Knight’s journey was to seek it. But life isn’t about searching endlessly to find what’s missing; it’s about learning to live with the missing parts. Knight had been away too long, and I sensed that there was no coming back. He had a brilliant mind, but all his thinking had only trapped him alone in the woods.
“Yeah, the brilliant man,” says Knight, “the brilliant man went to find contentment, and he did. The brilliant man wishes he weren’t so stupid to do illegal things to find contentment.”
During nearly every visit in the county jail, Knight had chastised me for a few moments about abandoning my wife and the cowboys, neglecting my fatherly duties to talk with him. I’d found it amusing—he had shirked all responsibility entirely—but in the end, he was right. I saw what happened to Knight and felt only the urge to go home.
For Knight, his camp was the one spot on the planet where he knew he belonged. His existence had been extraordinarily challenging at times, but he’d made it work. So he had remained there as long as he could.
He doesn’t want to sit in a shed taking apart engines. He has known something far more profound, and that sense of loss feels unbearable. I understand all this, yet I’m powerless to change anything or relieve his pain. We stand there, our tears streaming. He will return to the trees, his real home, even if it is just to die. “I miss the woods,” he says.
Knight fishes out his watch once more. He says he probably won’t see me ever again. It was risky to speak even this once, against his family’s wishes. There won’t be another conversation. After he’s gone, he says, I can tell his story any way I want. “You’re my Boswell,” he declares. He no longer cares what’s written about him. “I’ll be with the Lady of the Woods, I’ll be happy,” he tells me. “You can make T-shirts with my image on them if you wish, and have your kids sell them on the corner.”
I smile at the idea, suspending my tears. The world is a confusing place, meaningful and meaningless at once. “It was good to see you,” he says. He walks me around the garage to my car, and leaves me there. His mother will be coming any
minute. “Go,” he whispers. “Go.” And I do.
28
A mile down the road, I pull over. He just told me he was going to kill himself, that he has a detailed plan for it. Now what am I supposed to do: Keep it a secret? Call the police, his family, a caseworker? Do I have a legal responsibility? A moral one? I drive to my hotel in a panic and phone a couple of therapists for advice.
The legal part is clear: a man who says he’s going to kill himself in six months is not making an imminent threat. It doesn’t matter if Knight passes time like a tree, his six months not like our six months—I could take him to the police or a hospital and they wouldn’t hold him against his will.
Morally, things are murkier. To me, Knight is serious about his threat, no question. Catherine Benoist, a clinical psychologist in private practice near Chicago, agrees: “He meets several criteria that would classify him as being at a very high potential for suicide.” His need for autonomy, Benoist adds, only amplifies this likelihood, as suicide can be considered the ultimate expression of independence. Thomas Frazier of the Center for Autism in Cleveland seconds this opinion: “He’s at very, very high risk for suicide.” Peter Deri, the clinical psychologist in New York, says, “I would worry about him.”
I worry all night, and in the morning I decide to return to his home and tell him in person that I’m conflicted. We’ll talk it out, I’m thinking, like I’d do with a real friend. I drive the rural roads toward Albion, and just before his house I approach his brother’s place, where the garage door is open, and inside, tinkering with an engine, is a man: thin, glasses, jeans, baseball cap. It’s Chris. I pull over. The man in the garage looks up.
It’s not him. It’s Daniel. We see each other. I’m stopped on the side of the road, close enough to talk, so I feel like I have little choice but to get out and say hello. I’m pulling the door handle when I notice, up the street, a man frantically waving at me. This time it is Chris. I drive away from Daniel awkwardly, without speaking, and park in front of the garage with the weather vane.
Chris approaches my car and motions for me to lower the window. I do not. I open the door and step out. He’s extremely agitated—he witnessed my brief encounter with Daniel and says I’ve done “terrible damage.” Knight’s face, I see, has closed again. The previous day, he had been so willing to reveal himself, and now he’s snapped shut. I explain that I was afraid of what he’d told me about the Lady of the Woods. “I was just exploring an idea,” he says angrily. He’s retreating from his threats, it’s clear, to get rid of me.
“Go back to Montana,” Knight says. “The cowboys need their father. Leave me alone. Now.” He walks inside his house without another word, and for the second time in two days I drive back to my hotel upset.
This time I call real estate agents. It doesn’t seem healthy for a middle-aged man to live in his childhood room. A tiny cabin, roof caved in, is $16,500. I wonder if he’d accept such a gift, or if his therapist would agree that it’s a good idea. He’d still need money, for repairs and food, and he has not a dollar. All of the donations to his cause went to restitution, and he owes more.
Knight had specifically asked me not to interfere in his life, so I veto buying him the cabin and fly home. I write him a letter: “I absolutely cannot stand the thought that you may choose to take a stroll with the Lady of the Woods.” I do not tell his caseworker, or anyone else in Knight’s life, about the suicide risk, but every month or so I write again, through spring and summer and into fall. There’s no reply.
When November arrives, the time of his threat, I can stand it no longer. I book a flight to Maine, and ten days before I leave, I send him a brief note saying I’m on my way. My wife calls me while I’m changing planes in New York. A postcard has arrived from Knight. “ ‘Urgently important that you leave me alone,’ ” she reads to me over the phone. “ ‘Show me respect by leaving me alone. Please. If you appear I will call police. Leave me alone. Please.’ ” I fly back without seeing him.
Winter descends, and I try to keep tabs on Knight. Every North Pond resident I speak with says the past two summers without the hermit have been the most carefree in memory. People have been leaving their cabin doors unlocked, like in the old days. “It’s just done,” says Jodie Mosher-Towle, editor of the twice-yearly bulletin the North Pond News. “It’s in the past. Nobody wants to hear about the hermit anymore around here, because it’s like yeah, whatever.” Maloney, the DA, e-mails to tell me that Knight continues to arrive in court promptly every Monday and is doing fantastically well. So at least I know he’s alive.
At the end of winter, Maloney announces that Knight has completed the Co-Occurring Disorders and Veterans Court and on March 23, 2015, he will officially graduate. It’s been nearly two years since his arrest at Pine Tree. “His performance in this court has been flawless,” Justice Mills says at his final hearing. “There was never a misstep. He has done everything he has been asked to do.” Knight is placed on probation for three years, unable to possess alcohol or drugs and required to continue psychological counseling, but with few other restrictions. “Mr. Knight,” says Maloney, “is now a member of our community.”
Knight sits in the defendant’s chair in court, still thin and clean-shaven, but with something different about him. Though he doesn’t speak at graduation, his demeanor seems more docile. There is an unfamiliar slackness to his visage. He is wearing a navy blue V-neck sweater over a white button-down, like a kindergarten teacher.
In one of the first letters he wrote me, Knight described himself, in verse, as “defensive, defiant, aggressive, you bet,” then added, concluding the rhyme, “but at least not compliant, at least not yet.” From the initial moment I encountered Knight, through to the day he told me he wanted to kill himself, he was full of defiance.
Now, in court, he seems compliant. Fighting against everything, he may have realized, only makes one’s life infinitely harder. He has seen the bottomless nonsense of our world and has decided, like most of us, to simply try to tolerate it. He appears to have surrendered. It is rational, yet heartbreaking.
After the hearing, I drive by North Pond again. I park my car beside the road and struggle through the snow-choked woods to his camp. It’s my eighth trip here; I’ve spent the night five times, across every season. Now I sense that the site, as with Knight himself, has been scrubbed of some crucial vitality.
The Maine Department of Environmental Protection had recently sent in a six-person team and an all-terrain vehicle and removed the remaining trash and propane tanks, creating more of a human trail in a few hours than Knight did in decades.
It’s now just a spot in the woods. One or two more summers and it’ll probably be hard to tell that someone lived here. I sit on a boulder, out of the snow, trying to catch a few blades of sunlight slashing through the branches. Still, I shiver. It feels a little lonely here.
Modern life seems set up so that we can avoid loneliness at all costs, but maybe it’s worthwhile to face it occasionally. The further we push aloneness away, the less are we able to cope with it, and the more terrifying it gets. Some philosophers believe that loneliness is the only true feeling there is. We live orphaned on a tiny rock in the immense vastness of space, with no hint of even the simplest form of life anywhere around us for billions upon billions of miles, alone beyond all imagining. We live locked in our own heads and can never entirely know the experience of another person. Even if we’re surrounded by family and friends, we journey into death completely alone.
“Solitude is the profoundest fact of the human condition,” wrote the Mexican poet and Nobel laureate Octavio Paz. “Ultimately, and precisely in the deepest and most important matters, we are unspeakably alone,” wrote the Austro-German poet Rainer Maria Rilke.
Surprisingly, I receive one final letter from Knight. It’s an elegy to our relationship, five lines long. He instructs me to purchase some flowers for my wife, and candy for the cowboys, “for compensation of your absence to Maine.” Then he t
ells me never to come back. “For now and then hence.”
He doesn’t sign his name, of course, but for the first time, he includes a small doodle, done with colored pencils. It’s a flower, just a single flower, a daisy with red petals and a yellow center and two green leaves, blooming at the bottom of his note. An unmistakably optimistic sign. I take it as a signal that he’s adapted at least somewhat to his new life. I take it to mean that even if he can never live the way he wishes to, he won’t be walking with the Lady of the Woods. I take it as a sign of hope.
Sometimes, though, I can’t help but wonder, What if? What if Sergeant Hughes hadn’t been so dedicated, and Knight had never been caught? Knight told me that he planned to stay out there forever. He was willing to die in his camp, the spot where he was most content. Even without a cleanup crew, it would not take too long for nature to reclaim the area, ferns sprouting, roots creeping through, his tent and his body and eventually his propane cylinders consumed by the soil.
It’s the ending, I believe, that Knight planned. He wasn’t going to leave behind a single recorded thought, not a photo, not an idea. No person would know of his experience. Nothing would ever be written about him. He would simply vanish, and no one on this teeming planet would notice. His end wouldn’t create so much as a ripple on North Pond. It would have been an existence, a life, of utter perfection.
Gratitude
For patience and understanding and love:
Jill Barker Finkel
Phoebe Finkel
Beckett Finkel
Alix Finkel
For responding with elegance and intelligence:
Christopher Knight
For tinkering with the parts:
Andrew Miller
Stuart Krichevsky
Michael Benoist
Jim Nelson
Geoffrey Gagnon
Paul Prince
The Stranger in the Woods Page 15
